On the Door Step
by mountain ash
Summary: A little character excersise. Petunia's point of view of the morning she found Harry on her doorstep.


**Disclaimer: I own nothing!**

**Just a little one-shot, character exercise I came up with awhile ago that I thought I'd post. No, I am not abandoning my other story, this was just an excersion. **

Petunia Dursley woke up to a sunny, quiet, normal morning. The only noises were Mr. Dursley snoring and birds singing from the perfectly pruned hedges and the perfect, cute little bird house in the front garden.

She was the first on to rise that morning-also perfectly normal.

Heading downstairs, she began to make breakfast. Her little Duddy-kins would want his food when he woke up. Petunia smiled when she thought of her only child. Her beautiful, strong, perfect child. A much better child, surely, than her nephew.

Petunia shivered slightly. She tried to think about her sister and anything to do with her as little as possible. The only reason she was thinking of her at all was because Vernon had brought her up yesterday during the news. She hurriedly shifted her attention to the eggs she was making and the bacon she was burning. Lily was the one black, sticky blemish on Petunia's perfect, normal life, a spot that resisted scrubbing, a stain that would likely never come off.

She threw out the burned bacon and carefully laid out exactly six pieces of bacon into the pan, spaced exactly an inch apart. She doubted Lily made perfect, normal breakfasts every morning. Lily probably served something odd and wizardy, done to less than perfection. She shivered, and threw her efforts back into not thinking about her sister.

Eventually, Vernon and Dudley awoke and came downstairs, which creaked and groaned under their weight. Vernon began his daily complaint about 'young people these days.' Today, it was their fashions.

"…Going around in ridiculously short shorts, wearing tee-shirts with meanings phrases and labels, like walking advertisements-why, just yesterday at work I saw people dressed in _cloaks_ all over the street!"

Petunia stiffened at this. Her sister had come home from _that school_ wearing a cloak like it wasn't odd at all, always pulling things out of the pockets. All of their friends had been so impressed by Lily's magical parlor tricks when she came home for the summer. Some had even gone and gotten cloaks of their own. No one listened to Petunia's opinion on that rubbish. Cloaks were things that wizards wore, and so people who wore them were to be avoided like a poisonous snake.

"Well, at least our little Diddums will never wear awful things like that. Isn't that right, Dudley?" Petunia's one-year-old pig of a son pounded the table with his meaty fist and wailed the new word he had only just learned the previous day. "Won't!" Whether that was in response to his Mother's question, or he was saying he 'won't' eat the fruit his mother had put on his plate was difficult to determine. Most likely the later, as Dudley commenced to throw a peach slice across the table. Petunia quickly pulled his plate out of range and offered him more bacon.

Five minutes later, Dudley seized another opportunity to exercise his vocabulary. Petunia had recently begun trying to transition Dudley from whole milk to 2% milk. Dudley didn't like this at all. "Won't!" He cried, and toppled his plastic cup.

Ever-vigilant Vernon had his eyes trained on his newspaper, muttering every once in awhile, so Petunia was left to clean up the table and Dudley, and pour him a new glass of milk (this time whole.)

That was the last of the whole milk, unfortunately. After breakfast she would have to put out the milk cans.

Vernon muttered something into his newspaper, and helped himself to more bacon and eggs.

When breakfast finally ended, Petunia cleared the table, and then sponged it off. Lily surely never wiped down _her_ table so thoroughly-she would just leave crumbs to multiply under the placements. Lily never had put the same care into cleanliness that Petunia had.

Swiping the milk bottles from the otherwise spotless Formica countertop, she made her way to the front door, almost breaking her leg on one of Dudley's scattered toys on the way. Normally she would have picked them up, but the last time she had, Dudley had thrown a tantrum with a rage that would have impressed Utilla the Hun when he couldn't find them.

Opening the door, she placed her milk bottles down, humming to herself. Perhaps while she was outside she could take a quick peak over the neighbor's fence.

Up until this point, Petunia's day had been blissfully normal. This, however, was about to change.

Petunia hadn't bothered to look down at the doorstep-she went down it everyday to spy on the neighbors. Why look at a doorstep when you can look at what flowers the people next door are planting and see if they match the house's paint job? So she was caught completely off guard when she set the milk bottles down on something with give to it.

Jerking her hand back like she had touched a hot pan, she glanced down.

There was a baby on her doorstep.

The milk bottles fell from her hand with a loud _clang_ that would have woken anyone on the street who might still have been sleeping. And if it hadn't, the blood-curling shriek that followed on its heels would have.

Petunia shrieked and shrieked. At first she was only surprised. Who expected to find a baby on their doorstep? However, the shriek had morphed into something closer to despair when she saw the name printed on the envelope tucked into the baby's hand.

It read "Harry Potter."

Potter.

The forbidden word in this household.

Vernon burst through the hallway holding the bacon pan like a club, which still needed a washing.

"What is it, Petunia?"

Petunia didn't say a word. She just continued to shriek like a tea kettle until her breath completely deserted her. She opened and closed her mouth a few times, before silently pointing to the messy bundle of blankets on their doormat. Vernon peered over her shoulder and paled.

"Potter," He whispered. Or perhaps it was a whimper. The word slipped through his slack jaw like a tiny droplet of water, with barely a sound. Petunia may even have imagined that he said anything at all. However, the little boy must have heard it. His eyes snapped open and focused on Petunia. He had Lily's eyes.

Petunia's mind ceased to function normally. Her vision was filled with the image of her sister's eyes looking up at her, like she was looking at the sun. Faintly, she could hear Vernon tearing open the envelope and reading the letter aloud. Or perhaps Vernon just wasn't able to achieve a greater volume than that faint, far-away whisper.

Lily was dead, and so was her good-for-nothing husband. They had been murdered in their home. She, Petunia, was the only living relative of the boy, and so they were being entrusted with his well-being.

Lily's eyes continued to stare at her through her son's face. Before Petunia's eyes, the little black stain on her perfect life that was the Potters expanded.

Behind her, Vernon was trying to comfort her.

"Don't you worry, we'll stamp that magic nonsense out of him. We'll make him normal. I'll burn that letter right now. The child will never know. A good beating will knock that magic rubbish right out and no one will be the wiser. Don't you worry."

But you couldn't stamp it out, because, like a cockroach, magic refused to be stamped out. Her abnormal, disgraceful sister's son would grow up to be just as abnormal and disgraceful as his mother. She should have known her normalcy was too good to last.

She would never be able to shield Dudley from wizardry now, not when it had invaded her very household. She could never stamp out the magic in this child. She would never be able to forget her sister and move on-not with her sister's eyes watching her every single day from now on.

The neighbors would have heard her scream, or would have already seen the boy on their doorstep. She couldn't get rid of it in the dead of night without someone finding out. And even if she could foist the bundle of blankets off onto some orphanage, there were sure to be wizards watching her every move, seeing to it that did no such thing. What if they were to retaliate against Dudley? _Their _types would probably stoop to that if she didn't take in this one-year-old curse.

Darkness descended on Petunia's eyes as she fainted into Vernon.

**Please Review!**

**It was hard to make Lily sound like a bad guy. So-how did I do on this little exercise? Anything too cliché, anything you liked, any suggestions? **


End file.
